Page 120 of Savage Ambition

“Since I first beat you on a test?” I guessed.

He lifted my hips more. “Third time.”

I laughed. “Seriously?”

“Mm-hmm.” He thrust hard to punctuate each of his points. “The first time, I figured it was luck. The second one surely must have been a fluke. But the third time was infuriating enough to capture my attention.”

“So, because I beat you,” I tried to reason, breaking off with a groan when he hit something new within me that made me squirm, “you wanted to do this with me?”

His wicked smirk suited him. “And so much more.” He leaned down and kissed me hard. His hips picked up speed, driving into me with newfound urgency.

I gasped against his mouth. “I’m close.”

“Look at me when you come around my cock,” he commanded. “I want to feel you, Shaw.”

In all our encounters at the brothel, he’d never once used my real name during sex. Hearing it in my bedroom proved I held Dante right now, not Dragon.

“Say it again,” I begged.

“You’re mine, Shaw,” he murmured.

His possessiveness tipped me over the edge. I cried out his name, seizing around him as I spilled across my stomach.

Dante’s movements turned erratic. With a few sharp snaps of his hips, he followed me over, moaning my name as he came.

Dante eventually eased backward, making us both wince at the separation. When he slipped completely free, I gasped at the awful absence. My body didn’t know how to process the hollow feeling. I shifted my hips, feeling a trickle of wetness from the lube between my cheeks, a physical reminder of what we’d done.

I now existed in two states of before Dante completely dismantled me, and after.

He disposed of the condom while I grabbed a tissue from the nightstand. When he returned to bed, he gathered me against his chest without hesitation.

“How do you feel?” Dante asked, his hand tracing idle patterns on my back.

“Better than okay,” I replied.

“Good.” Sincerity and satisfaction coated the single word. His fingers combed through my hair.

“I didn’t know it could be like that,” I admitted.

Dante took a deep breath. “It usually isn’t.”

I hesitated, weighing the risk of asking against the safety of silence in the face of Dante’s rare vulnerability.

“What are you thinking about so hard?”

“This changes things, doesn’t it?” I asked.

His hand stilled before resuming its gentle motion. “Yes.”

“In what way?”

Dante stayed quiet for so long I assumed he wouldn’t answer. Finally, he said, “I’m not sure, but it’s different now.”

“Because I’m not just a client?”

He squeezed me closer. “You’ve never been a mere client. My interest in you started long before you ever set foot in Gennaro Corporation.”

While I knew it was true, it still felt good to hear him say it out loud.